Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Why we watched
By Ari Rabkin
Cornell Daily Sun (Cornell U.)
10/05/2006

(U-WIRE) ITHACA, N.Y. — The killing in Darfur has gone on for years now, and western efforts to intervene have made little difference. At this point, it appears certain that the killing will stop when the killers are finished, and not before. This is an ugly fact, but we must be honest with ourselves. More broadly, we must admit that when the world supposedly said "never again" to genocide, it really meant "never mind." The world's response to mass death has been a few rounds of diplomatic tut-tutting and some largely symbolic economic sanctions, both shrugged off by the Sudanese government. Just as in Rwanda, no Western power has taken any effective steps to stop the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Why not? And what do we learn from this failure?

It turns out that genocide is not so easy to stop. Western governments, joined by the U.N. secretariat, have been condemning the violence in Darfur as loudly as they can. Diplomatic pressure has been tried, and found wanting. The United States has already imposed economic sanctions on Sudan; as far as this country is concerned, that option has been explored and exhausted. Russia and China are flatly opposed to any multilateral economic sanctions, and as a result, it seems very unlikely that any such sanctions will be imposed. Moreover, the failures of the U.S. embargo on Cuba and the U.N. sanctions on Saddam's Iraq suggest that economic sanctions would not be effective even if they could be imposed.

And what of military measures? Sudan has refused the presence of peacekeepers after the next few months; any new deployment of troops to Sudan will be not a peacekeeping mission, but an invasion. Few governments are prepared to commit troops to such a venture. The United States, of course, had been busy in Iraq; first removing a genocidal dictator, and then trying to rebuild the country in such a way as to avoid an ethnic civil war that could easily be as terrible as anything happening in Sudan. We don't have the stomach, or the troops, to invade another oil-rich Muslim country that is no danger to us, take sides in a civil war, and settle in for a long occupation enlivened by periodic guerilla attacks. However we might wish it to be otherwise, the United States is not strong enough or bloody-minded enough to stop every atrocity everywhere in the world. The United States abandoned Somalia to anarchy and starvation after a handful of U.S. troops were dragged through the streets; would we stay in Sudan if dozens of American soldiers were held hostage, and further action would result in their beheading?

What excuse does the rest of the world have? Armed intervention would be a difficult and prolonged project, and few European nations are prepared to embark on a program as ambitious as pacifying Sudan without very broad international agreement. After harrumpfing for years about the outrage that was Iraq, they are unwilling to undercut themselves by launching a unilateral war on Sudan, backed only by a "coalition of the willing." As a result, without U.N. approval, Europe is unwilling to use force. There is no chance of such U.N. approval. Russia and China have the right to veto all security council actions, and neither will tolerate any action being taken against Sudan. China buys oil from Sudan; Russia sells weapons to the Sudanese government. Neither wishes to disrupt their cozy trading arrangements; neither has any moral qualms about mass death abroad. Both made it perfectly clear that they opposed and would veto any measures to bring Sudan to heel. The West lacks effective leverage on Russia and China, and so, in the face of this blunt refusal, nothing can be done at the U.N. Consequently, the insistence by the "international community" that all action must be approved by the U.N. is one of the key factors that has allowed the genocide to go on.

Having mentally turned the problem over to an organization utterly unable to solve it, the nations of the world have shrugged, and gone back to their previous pursuits. Denouncing "unilateral American imperialist action" in Iraq is much more fun — and much safer — than acting unilaterally in Sudan, after all. It may be — it is likely — that the world's "never again" was merely formulaic, the diplomatic equivalent of a child's "I'm very sorry and I'll never do it again." "Never again" appears to be simply an empty slogan — and even a disservice to the victims whose slaughter we are idly watching. Current and potential victims of atrocities need to know that they cannot count on the international community; if they are to be saved, they must save themselves. Remaining "innocent victims" will do them no good; if they are to beat back their enemies, they will need to find their own ways to protect themselves.

Dealing with genocide is unquestionably a very grave problem for the world. But intoning "never again" is no solution, and it is now painfully clear that multilateral military action is unreliable, and the threat of it, ineffectual. Saying that minorities in danger of genocide must therefore look out for themselves is, however, saying very little. Those who need to defend themselves will acquire and use their own arms, whether or not the "world community" gives its blessing.

The people of Darfur need help, but it seems unlikely that the world community will supply it. It is to the credit of Cornell students that so many have participated in events to raise awareness of the atrocities taking place in Sudan, but before we pat ourselves on the back, we should acknowledge that we have no effective solutions to the problem.

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